Saturday, December 31, 2011

Game in progress - Wordy

Wordy in mid-game - bonus points for
anyone who can tell me the last word...

I spent a chunk of December working on a JavaScript-based game. My wife and I had enjoyed playing Zynga's WordTwist very much, but Zynga canceled that game earlier this year. So, I decided to recreate it, or something like it. This is not a very original concept - Word Whomp is basically the same thing, and there are numerous others - but still a fun way to exercise one's mental muscles, and I learned some cool stuff about JavaScript and browser-based games.

I'm still working on it, but give it a try if you want. I haven't done much interface work - e.g., no instructions! But it works. We've played a bunch of games of it already. To play, type any words you can make out of the letters provided, and try to get them all in the time limit.

I built it using a little PHP and a lot of JavaScript with a bunch of help from the CraftyJS game library, which I'd recommend to anybody. The dictionary I used was a subset of Kevin Atkinson's SCOWL project which was super-useful - I didn't want to use the whole Scrabble dictionary with all the really obscure words, but I wanted it to be mostly complete, and SCOWL let me decide what level of obscurity I was comfortable with. I'm still editing my list as I discover words it doesn't have (or words that it does have that it shouldn't!).